A Shiny App for R-Package Risk Assessment

Lars Andersen, 21st July 2023 @useR! 2023 Basel

Disclaimer




Any opinions expressed in this presentation and on the following slides are solely those of the presenter and do not necessarily reflect those of BI

Validating open-source software

  • Group of ~50 companies (mostly pharma & biotech)


  • Mission: R Validation Hub is a cross-industry initiative whose mission is to enable the use of R by the Bio-Pharmaceutical industry in a regulatory setting, where the output may be used in submissions to regulatory agencies.

Two tools and what do they do?



is a framework to quantify an R package’s “risk” by assessing several meaningful metrics designed to evaluate package development best practices, code documentation, community engagement, and development sustainability.


is a full-fledged R package containing a shiny front-end that augments the utility of {riskmetric}. The application’s goal is to provide a central hub for an organization to review and assess the risk of R packages, providing handy tools and guide rails along the way.

Quantify risk programmatically

  • A license
  • Source code available for browsing
  • An easy to contact maintainer
  • A place to report bugs
  • Evidence that new bugs are being addressed
  • Complete Function documentation
  • Adequate test coverage
  • Community usage
  • 18 total assessments (to date)!

Why create a Shiny app?

  • Analyze {riskmetric} output without the need to write R code
  • Run {riskmetric} on the same machine with the same environment – creating central hub for reproducibility of risk scores
  • Facilitate and store communication on certain packages / metrics
  • Automatic package categorization with an overall decision based on {riskmetric} scores
  • Generate dynamic reports
  • Leverage user authentication with user role management

Demo




Shinyapps.io

Coming soon

{riskscore}

In it’s early stages, a new data package containing the {riskmetric} assessments & scores for all packages on CRAN.

Coming soon

Package Explorer

A suite of hands-on review tools (from our friends at GSK) will allow users to browse unit tests, source code, and man (doc) pages for any exported function.

Dev Team

Q & A